Monday, March 25, 2013

With Ryanair and Lion Air ordering billions of dollars worth
of new planes, is the budget airline sector fueling the latest civil aviation
boom?

By: Ringo Bones

Ryanair CEO Michael O’Leary might have picked the very right
time to order 15.6 billion US dollars worth of the new Boeing 737 Max aircraft.
After all, with Boeing’s on-going problems with the lithium ion batteries of
the auxiliary power unit of their fleet of 787 Dreamliners already in service
around the world, the Ryanair CEO could easily negotiate Boeing to buy a new
fleet of 737 Max at a very keen price.

On the East Asian low cost airline scene, Indonesia’s Lion
Air - currently Indonesia’s largest
privately run airline company - decides to buy 24 billion US dollars worth of
new fleet of aircraft from Airbus back in March 19, 2013 given that budget air
travel is the only economically viable business move in the region at the
moment. But can the budget airline sector manage to revitalize the currently
struggling civil aviation market?

Even though well-healed tourists had always associated
budget airlines with shoddy sub-par service, overseas contract workers –
especially from the economically depressed parts of the East Asian region – had
been embracing low-cost carriers since the late 1990s as their commute of
choice on their way to work in the more affluent parts of the Persian Gulf to
earn money for their families. And if the world’s major civil aviation firms
manage to make keenly priced intermediate range passenger planes favored by low
cost airline operators, then maybe, low cost airlines could spearhead the global
economic recovery all of us desperately needs.

Tuesday, March 5, 2013

As the current most expensive weapons systems procurement
program by The Pentagon, is the F-35 Lightning’s jet engine problems affecting
its airworthiness status?

By: Ringo Bones

Back in February 25, 2013, a news story aired about a fleet
of 50 F-35 Lightning aircraft were grounded after a routine maintenance
discovered cracks in one of the plane’s turbine blades of its Pratt & Whitney F135 jet engine. Given that the F-35
program is currently The Pentagon’s most expensive weapons systems procurement
program, will this turbine blade problem eventually affect its airworthiness?

Given that current Federal laws still prohibit the export of
the 120 million US dollar F-22 Raptor – even to America’s allies – Lockheed
Martin developed a “budget” version of the Raptor called the F-35 Lightning
during the late 1990s and it currently retails around 85 million US dollars
each. Currently there are two variants of the F-35 – a conventional takeoff and
landing version that needs 10,000-foot runways that Turkey and other American
allies had been eyeing to purchase since 2010 and a
short-takeoff-and-vertical-landing or STOVL version which the UK had been also
eyeing to buy as a replacement for its ageing fleet of Harrier jump jets.

Ever since the first decade of the 21st Century,
Lockheed Martin had been pitching the F-35 Lightning – especially its
conventional takeoff and landing version – as the logical replacement of the
F-16 Fighting Falcon, although these days, the top brass of the various arms of
the US DoD had been eyeing the F-35 as a viable replacement of the A-10 Warthog
and the F-18 Hornet. And there are two main capabilities of the F-35 that is
absent of the older generation of military aircraft it sets to replace – like
stealth and supercruise.

As with the F-22 Raptor, the F-35 Lightning was designed
with stealth capability - that is it is very hard to “see” or detect using
conventional air defense radar. And its lightweight mostly composite material
airframe allow the F-35 to have supercruise capability – i.e. fly supersonic
without turning on its jet engines fuel hungry afterburners and like the F-22,
the F-35 only requires the pilot to turn the afterburners only if he or she
wishes to fly faster than Mach 1.5.

Also, the short-takeoff-and-landing or STOVL version of the
F-35 Lightning also has the advantage over the Harrier jump-jet it sets to
replace due to its use of a lifting fan. The F-35’s lifting fan allow it to
perform a very short running 100-yard takeoff and land vertically without the
hot-gas ingestion problems that often cause the Harrier to crash during
vertical landing maneuvers.

IN the austere fiscal era of the post credit crunch world
were shrinking national defense budgets are the norm - rater than the
exception, Lockheed Martin’s F-35 Lightning seems to be the best high
performance military aircraft out there with a good price-performance ratio, if
only the famed aerospace firm can solve its current turbine blade crack
problems. If it does, it could probably become a leading figure in the
aerospace industry for years to come despite the world’s ever shrinking
national defense budgets.